THURSDAY
Up early so packed, made tea in flask and bid farewell to Samantha. Her friend the astro-physicist was a great source of conversation the previous evening.
I ran along Hwy44 through the Dakota Badlands. Great road, with lots of scenery and VERY little traffic 🙂
Popped by Mount Rushmore, with thanks to the French family that I bumped into 😉
Into Sturgis for lunch. They were getting ready for the 75th annual Harley riders meeting. Vendors already in place.
My GPS led me astray again, so jumped onto the highways.
Rode the I90, by/along the Little Bighorn Battlefield enroute to Billings, Montana.
Registration @ Montana Pavilion, with place looking full. Ended up in the “back40”, sandy area, and windy. Most had arrived yesterday, and taken the bus for their downtown pub-crawl of the brew-ubs today. DRAT. Missed this! Still, there were $2 beers from each of the breweries, to go with the bands.
FRIDAY
Spent the day looking at vendor offerings, area offerings and getting to know neighbours (Stretch and others).
The kind volunteers fixed my jacket collar properly. I had “fixed it” with duck tape over a year ago.
I bought a new/better pair of handlebar muffs. Bright yellow and blue. Much easier to be seen.
Evening ended with a few more $2 beers after a rib supper, plus chat.
SATURDAY
Took back the Wunderlich handlebar-muffs. Design flaws: (1) caused gloves to stick to the plastic windows, and (2) muffs were tight around controls, eg: indicator buttons. Still, they did fit over the plastic deflectors………maybe next year.
Then took a run to see if I could fix/replace my visor. Ended up with a new helmet. Well, I was wanting a new one, so the visor dropping into my lap as I rode into Billings on Thursday, was treated as an omen.
Had a nice steak and ceasar salad, then back to MetraPark and watch door prizes being handed out, followed by a great band ‘Mustang Sally‘ that really gave rise to the term “hardworking band”. We were not a lively crowd at first, but they got us up and dancing!
SUNDAY
We all got up, washed then packed on our own schedule. Remarkably, there was no traffic-jam trying to get out. We all slipped out, one by one.
Facilities were basic, but only real issue was the WiFi that seemed to be overloaded and SLOW. The one time it was OK was at 5am.
THIS ALL HAPPENED HERE
Latitude:45.79734
Longitude:-108.47469
GPS location Date/Time:07/23/2015 23:57:29 EDT
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